


The Other Side Of Magic

by Garmonbozia



Category: Now You See Me (Movies)
Genre: ALL THE PLOT, long fic, not kidding there's a full-on long form plot, plot heavy, teamfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-06 11:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11599383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garmonbozia/pseuds/Garmonbozia
Summary: They say a team is only as strong as its leader. Which is all well and good, until somebody takes your leader out of play. A team is defined by what they do then - who they trust, how they pull together, how hard they'll fight to get him back.(Full-length teamfic. Plot, intrigue, villainy, Alma, the whole nine yards. Updates every other day)





	1. Chapter 1

Her hair is up.  
It’s after seven. Her shoes are tucked in neat against the wall, under her hanging coat. The coat is still a little dark across the shoulders from the afternoon’s rain but mostly dry; she’s been home a while. She’s changed the rest of her clothes.  
But Alma’s hair is still up.  
And now that he’s looking there are other signs. Like the warped black dish of a microwave meal keeping the trash can from quite closing, and a smell that tells me most of it went uneaten. There are little damp flecks all around the sink where something was scrubbed with a rough brush and no mercy. The note he left when he went out, that he didn’t know when he’d be back, is still on the side table where he left it. When he glances at that he catches his reflection in the mirror fixed above it. Could be better. It’s been worse, but it’s been better. It would be important except that, as has been pointed out, as he can’t get out of his head, Alma’s hair is still up.  
Thank God his own day went smoothly. Thank God he shaved this morning. Thank God it’s no longer raining and he hasn’t left drips and shoeprints in the doorway.  
Before you accuse him of overreacting – or worse, before you have to ask what he’s thinking at all – let’s just be absolutely clear, it is all the way up. Not tied back, not pushed away from her face, up. Twisted and pinned and neatly up against the back of her head.  
Alma’s hair doesn’t go up until she reaches her desk in the morning. Alma can wind in the familiar knot, knock back a four-shot coffee and give a task force briefing all at the same time. It is the very last thing she does to make herself ready, to become the consummate professional she has to be. And she hates it. She pushes and pulls at it every second her hands are idle. By lunch she usually has to take it down and redo it, she’s loosened so much of it. Most nights she doesn’t make it so far as the train before she lets it go. He’s met her once or twice, dashing into the station with a mouthful of pins, hands behind her head looking for the last of them.  
And here she is, after seven, on the couch in mismatched sweats and white rabbit slippers which do not fit her because they were a gag gift not to her but to Dylan, and her hair is still up.  
He takes an extra second or two over hanging up his jacket. He wants very much to come straight out and ask what’s the matter. But that would be wrong. Don’t ask him to explain it, he just has this powerful sense that such a direct approach would get him absolutely nowhere and very probably make her mad. But he wants so much to say it he’s having trouble thinking of any other way to put it. And in the end he hesitates too long and misses his chance.  
A smile instead of bon soir and, “I didn’t make dinner. You said you didn’t know when you’d be back, so…” She looks back down to the magazine on the arm of the sofa. Sudden and self-conscious, she flips a page, maybe realizing she’s been staring at the same paragraph since before the door opened.  
With as much casual caution as he’s capable of, Dylan crosses the room and sits next to her. He throws half a glance over her shoulder, just to see what she’s reading. Alma bristles.  
“Good day?”  
“No,” she says, and says it so lightly she might be saying just the opposite. “You?”  
“Total bust. But it’s not the end of the world. These things never work out straight away, you just have to keep chipping away at them.” While he speaks she is nodding gently. If you didn’t know them better, you might think she wasn’t listening, but it’s not that. Alma really does agree. She agrees in principle. Principle is really all they have, given they really can’t share the details of their separate secret lives with each other. She nods because he seems to be making sense. Sometimes Dylan gets the uneasy sensation that as much as she ever hopes for is for him to make sense.  
Maybe you can imagine, this makes small talk difficult to sustain. Normally neither of them has a problem with silence. Gentle, comfortable. Comforting; there are far worse things than being able to live with someone without constantly having to fill the space between you.  
But he really, really wants to ask her what’s wrong.  
It is becoming imperative. It burns in his lungs like a held breath, begging to break from him. But how can he? How can he when Alma is so determinedly placid, so wholeheartedly committed to this act of nonplussed and easy-going and unperturbed. She is a still pool, except that she’s gone the other way with her magazine, and has turned four pages in the last ninety seconds.  
Stretching out his arm on the back of the couch, Dylan delicately seeks out the end of one of her hairpins and pushes. When the bent head slips free at the other side of the knot, he picks it out and turns it back between his fingers. He’s onto the fourth before she feels a hank slide free and flinches. With a terse little noise, like a groan not quite stifled, “Not tonight, okay?”  
“What? No, I was just… helping.” Or I thought I was, but he bites that back. That’s another one of those bad things, one of those things you shouldn’t say, a can-opener of a thing and who knows what might be the can?, no, that’s something not to say, that is a thing to remain unsaid.  
But he did catch her meaning. He knows what Alma thought he wanted. Maybe, then, space is the issue. Space has been an issue in the past. Dylan learned the hard way about space.  
It wasn’t his fault, not really. He himself is not into space. The life he’s chosen, the vocation that found him, even his own natural inclinations, all of these things have conspired to see to it that Dylan grew up with a whole lot of space. So when things are particularly difficult, when there are problems, when he runs into something he can’t handle, space has never been Dylan’s go-to solution. When he comes to a bad pass, it is generally because space and isolation and independence have not worked. When Dylan is struggling, he looks for other people.  
Alma is more sociable. Not just generally, off-duty, but at work too. She’s part of an organization and on a normal day she isn’t working against it from inside so there’s a considerable difference there. Sort of a yawning chasm of a difference and maybe you’d think Dylan should have spotted it a mile off.  
‘Should have’ and ‘did’ are not the same thing. The relationship survived the ordeal but he’s never been able to shake the suspicion that the final round of yelling might have been what killed Alma’s last goldfish.  
It is with one eye on its replacement, drifting blithely around its tank and utterly unaware of its own importance, that he gets up and tries to leave her there. At first he does very well, encouraged by the note of mild relief on her sigh as he leaves the room. He gets all the way through showering and changing and does not want to go back to the couch, not for a second. The burning, clawing desperation to just ask her what’s the matter subsides. Really it does, it’s not urgent at all. He even manages to think of something else for a second, and when he goes to the door of the living room again, it’s only because the kitchen is on the other side of it. Honestly. He’s hungry. That’s it, that’s all, no more than that. Dylan wants a sandwich.  
But he looks at her. Well, of course he does. To not even look at her, that would be taking things too far in the other direction. She doesn’t have to return the favour, it’s just that he happens to look in her direction.  
Alma’s hand is curled up by her mouth. Tiny but insistent, her front teeth click as they slide over and over again off the end of a nail they would like to bite through.  
With the uncanny speed of the guilty and caught, her hand flashes away but it’s too late. “Okay, that’s enough.” Forget the kitchen, Dylan sits next to her again. “First the hair and now this-“  
“Hair? What are you talking about? Now what?”  
“You haven’t bitten your nails since you stopped smoking!”  
Alma draws back. One fussy fumbling hand reaches back to pull the rest of her hair down. She mutters, “That was before I ever met you.”  
“C’mon, don’t change the subject. I see things, it’s my job.”  
“Didn’t we agree we wouldn’t bring work home with us?”  
“Look who’s talking.”  
“Ah! Bien sur, j’étais la problème. Tu compliques toujours les choses? On était d’accord. J’ai promis de ne rien dire, ne demandes pas. Je me sens déjà mal.”  
“Woah, hang on, slow down-“  
“Ton français ne pas si mal…”  
“Pas mal at all, thank you, but you only switch to French when we’re disagreeing about something. And I haven’t had a chance to say anything you could disagree with. It was a completely unfair language change, it was a linguistic sucker punch. Just give me a sec to catch up.”  
The slightest flicker of a smile tries to take hold, then slips. She could so easily have glared, have sighed and called him childish, but Alma almost smiles. If anything, it’s worse. She’s not really angry. All of her warmth and her light are in there somewhere. It’s just that something is heavy enough to keep them buried, and she can’t forget it for more than just a flicker. “Please.” Her voice is soft and choked. Then she draws the deep breath she should have taken before she spoke at all and puts her hand on his arm. “It’s work. We don’t talk about work.”  
Because that would lead to all sorts of problems. It’s not the legal considerations – she told him all about the Russia-based money laundering operation which was collapsed when they found the eighty-year-old oligarch behind it all trying to see just how many hookers he could fit into a pool. It’s so they can’t hurt each other. They can’t worry about each other. Neither of them will ever learn anything that could compromise the other. There are no moral quandaries because they quite simply don’t venture into that territory. They knew all of this from the beginning, came right out and discussed it and came to an accord – in order to have a life together, their lives have had to remain separate.  
For the most part they’ve been sticking to it, and for the most part it has worked.  
That’s why he tells her she’s right. He doesn’t feel that way, but he says it. He isn’t sorry, but he apologizes. He goes to make her tea and says nothing when he hears her get up, following him to the kitchen. Some dim instinct tells him space is still key. That’s why he doesn’t look round right away. He finishes what he’s doing while she pulls one of the tall stools out from under the breakfast bar. He thinks she settles there.  
She doesn’t settle. Dylan sees his mistake the second he finally turns. Alma isn’t settled, not in any way, not any part of her. She’s perched on the edge, lips parted as if she had something to say and forgot it.  
He resists just long enough to finish making her tea and his own coffee. When he puts the mug in her hand she looks up as if she’d forgotten where they were. When her eyes stop drifting, his are there to hold them fixed. “Tell me.”  
“No.”  
“I hear you, and I hear the reasons, and I tried to agree, I really did. But you’re upset. I can’t have you upset, not if I can help it. It might not be one of the out-loud explicit promises we made each other but that’s only because it’s too basic for that. It’s a given. So tell me. Even if that’s all it is and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, tell me. Tell me everything.”  
Alma bites her lip before she’ll look at him again. Not ready to speak just yet. Her eyes are cooler when they come back, hard and assessing. Deciding.


	2. Chapter 2

It should not matter in the slightest what Alma chooses to tell, what she chooses to hold back, if she chooses to say anything at all. It shouldn’t.  
Why should they be different from any other couple? Why shouldn’t they do what anybody else does when they get home at night and bitch long and hard about the petty frustrations of the day that went before? Why does that have to be negotiated, why is it painful, why should they be denied such a simple and necessary thing? Why can’t they be normal?  
Admittedly, none of these questions is all that difficult. Answer the last one and you’ve probably covered the rest well enough. Their concerns are not petty. Idle office politics would not feature in these fantasy discussion. And, as Alma will learn tomorrow morning, no one will feel any better. There’s only guilt and nervousness ahead of her, the irrational fear that it is painted all over her face, Alma told all. Alma spilled. Tomorrow will brim full of brand new torments, fantasies of arrests eluded, trials prejudiced, evidence compromised, because she let secrets go. And those are just the workplace concerns. That’s before you even reach any thought of Dylan, and what else could be compromised? Then you come to Dylan himself and that’s a whole other mind’s worth of fear and anxiety. He’s always known what she does, it’s how they met, but did he ever think of the danger? When he was secretly her target no one got hurt. Robbed, yes, conned, fine, socially and psychologically crushed, definitely. But not hurt. Has he ever before thought of her in mortal danger, not as a hunter but as prey?  
It shouldn’t matter what she tells him but it does. In a small apartment in Paris, a frustrated professional rants away her troubles to her partner. She is one of thousands upon thousands doing the same thing at the same moment, all over the world. But it matters  
It’s too soon to say exactly what the consequences will be but it ought to be stated – here, now, so that blame cannot be shifted later – there are rules being broken in Paris right now.  
That’s another thing which is happening all over the world. A hell of a lot more than the venting partners, rules are getting broken. Little ones, big ones, laws, important ones, think for just a second how many rules you break in a day. How much stationery you sneak home from work. How often you’ve parked on the line because you’d only be a second. Think of the times you pretended not to see somebody rushing for the elevator doors, or turned down a side street because there was someone coming you didn’t want to speak to. If rules could scream we’d deafen ourselves with breaking them.   
For instance, just as Alma’s frustrations are changing irrevocably the fates of a dozen people simply by being voiced, there are rules being broken in Hong Kong. Give or take a little time difference, the sounds of their shattering could drown her out. Dozens of them. One on top of the other, falling into each other like dominos, rule upon rule dropping to the ground in jagged fragments.   
And will there be consequences? Knowing the Teflon-skinned bundle of arrogance and neuroses doing the breaking, probably not.  
First rule down, Danny should not be in Hong Kong. He’s supposed to be in Macau. If anybody needs him, they’ll be looking in Macau. If anything happens and he needs to be informed, the message will go to Macau. If he is noted missing from Macau, it may well cause a small ripple of worry. If Dylan knew he was no longer in Macau there’d be a hanging in the works. Purely an imaginary one, of course, but beautifully imagined, incredibly detailed, real enough to be just a little bit frightening.  
But there’s no use crying over a broken rule. Not when so many others are falling by the wayside. It would be unfair to pick one rule out of the dozens. Count them off, see how quickly you run out of fingers and toes – unauthorized travel under a previously-used ID, not telling anyone where he was going, he’s out in public – saw a show actually, enjoyed it, he’s having a nice evening – might have been recognized – it’s fine, she pointed him out of a friend and the friend shook her head, it’s fine, they think they imagined it – he’s been caught by the security cameras of maybe four different buildings and on the body-cam of a police officer he passed in the street and probably on the avid but palsied personal recordings of an elderly tourist at the show, has engaged at length with various service staff not vetted and known to be friendly and has been generally so unimaginably reckless that whole generations of Eye top brass are rolling in their graves, their mausoleums, their sarcophagi.  
And Danny feels awesome.  
Danny isn’t built for these long separations. He understands the need for them and he pretends he can bear it, but they kill him. Months at a time with no audience, that’s bad enough. Throw in the limits, where he can go, who he can talk to, where he can eat, what he can do to make the endless hours go by, and really they just ought to be happy he lasted this long. Tonight has been like having a boulder lifted his off his chest. Danny is having the most fun he’s had in weeks and absolutely no regrets.   
But prepare yourself, because the number of rules broken is about to bloom exponentially, exploding to encompass the social, the legal, the unwritten, the self-imposed and those of the hotel he’s visiting.  
When the show ends he’s one of the first to leave the auditorium. Awfully bad form. He leaves alone, speaks to no one. It probably counts as drawing attention to himself – and how many other rules could be crowded in under that umbrella? He deliberately draws the attention of the receptionist, and does so by pretending his Mandarin hasn’t improved at all in all this time alone. Once he’s got that he redirects it, sending her looking for lost property that never existed to begin with. While she’s out of the way and a less conscientious colleague is transfixed by a local celebrity coming out of the same show, Danny hangs over the desk and looks up the room number of a particular guest.   
He’s gone before the receptionist gets back, taking the stairs to the first floor away from the crowds. By calling all of the elevators a floor before they can, he gets one to himself.  
The room he’s looking for isn’t quite the penthouse but it’s close. There’s still that rush, his stomach vanishing, as the elevator rockets into what ought to be only sky. They say you forget the height, when you live with skyscrapers. Danny’s never gotten used to it. Something to do with spatial awareness, maybe, something his profession has ingrained into him, but there’s a sort of weightlessness that kicks in round about the twentieth floor. It’s harder for him to remember he’s inside than that he’s in the sky. 

And even though he isn’t there yet, even though it’s been a while since he’s seen her, he can hear the voice of the person he’s on his way to meet. He can hear the smile belie her sarcasm, “It’s called being happy. You’d know that if you did it more often. Though I don’t really want to think about why it kicks in in elevators…”  
When the doors part an older couple are waiting to get in. As they brush by each other Danny dips just the tips of two fingers into the gentleman’s pocket and removes their keycard. He reads their room number from it, pleased to find it relatively close to the one he needs. He finds both doors, checking that they’re on the same side of the hall. They’re only three doors apart. What a stroke of luck.   
He lets himself into the couple’s room and, because this is enough of an invasion of privacy already, tries not to look at anything on his way to the balcony doors. They’re alarmed, but Danny doesn’t mind. He puts his shoulder to the sliding mechanism anyway and shoves the door until it gives. Really, he can’t even hear the siren. It’s designed to be minimally distressing for other guests and there’s always quite a breeze forty floors up. That’s why they keep the gap between the balconies so small, keeps them from getting too exposed. Climbing from the first to the second he’s careful, aware of the unthinkable drop. But he throws himself over the second pair of railings, and the third. At the last gap he simply steps onto the middle bar of the rail, his second foot following to the top, and falls into his next step right there at her door.   
It’s open. He’d been expecting to have to force that one too. With the alarm already set off down the hall and the door locked from outside, it wouldn’t have been noticed. But the sliding door is slid half back, and half a gauzy drape is drifting out to brush the polished concrete. A pair of brown leather gloves with buckled straps at the wrists lies discarded on the outside table. Danny picks them up and takes them inside; there’s a trace, just the possibility, of rain in the air.   
No need to turn any lights on; the swollen, stretching city glows, a hundred thousand neons, a million tiny bulbs. Even at midnight here the sky is blue, that peculiar lightning shade that seems both to feed and feed off the self-important little dome of a world below.  
He beat her here. He’s glad of that. It gives him time, when he leaves her gloves on the dresser, to catch up. The exact shade of her hair these days, he finds that on the brush. He finds the print of her lips on blotter tissue and a necklace he’s never seen before, a tiny gold rabbit on a fine chain. He learns what perfume she wears now.   
You’d think all of that would prepare him, but Danny still jumps when the door opens.   
She knows there’s something wrong, something different. Wary even before her first step inside. Maybe it’s cruel but he lets her stay that way; it’s a much needed opportunity to pull himself together, to shake off the surprise. He’s been here less than a minute. He thought he’d beat her by more than that.  
It lets him watch her too. Her hand on the door in a plainer glove, the first soft sinking of a black patent heel into the deep carpet. By the lights of the city she is red and blue and purple and electric, made of sparking lines and edges as she eases herself inside. She’s tense, ready for danger and unafraid of it. Not that Danny ever had any doubts about coming here but if he had, they’d be gone now. Just the sight of her, they’d be gone.  
Then she sees what the supposed danger is and slams herself inside.   
“That’s not funny.”  
“Hello to you too. Caught your show, by the way, I’m impressed. How are you doing the mirror sequence? I thought you lost those twin assistants?”  
“I got new ones. You know you’re not as slick as you think, you set an alarm off.”  
“Down there. Where I’m not. I’m up here. Where the alarm’s not.” She turns to make sure the door is locked, and hangs her bracelets on the handle so they’ll rattle if anybody tries it. She tells him what he already knows, that he shouldn’t be here, that he’s supposed to be in Macau. But she’s covering up. Her nerves at finding somebody else in the room were real. So is her agitation, thinking this is his idea of a joke. But Danny can feel her smiling in the half light. By now he’s close enough to feel that and more, both arms working around her from behind. “I was in Macau. And then I heard there was going to be a show in a Hong Kong hotel, not even an hour away, devised and directed by the one and only Abigail Valentine-“  
She wrinkles her nose at the name, at the lie of hearing her own cover echoed back to her, “Don’t.”  
Danny corrects himself. Softly, right by her ear so that she can hear it, “Henley Reeves, then,” and hear her true self for once. Then tension goes out of her like a sigh at just the sound of it. “I had to come. Consider it checking out the competition. Where’d you get new twins?”  
She rolls her head back onto his shoulder, hands reaching for his. “Madrid. Just showed up at rehearsals one day. Figure someday they’ll disappear just the same so I’m using them while I’ve –“ Suddenly she turns out of his arms. But she keeps hold of his hands, backing away from him with a smile on her face, “Wait, don’t change the subject,” but she’s playing.  
“You know Dylan would one-hundred percent trade any one of us for a pair of twins? It’s true, he told me that once, in Monte Carlo. Honestly. In so many words, that’s what he said.”  
“He’d trade you for a sandwich if he knew you were here.”   
Trying to draw her close again, “Not scared of him.”  
Henley tips her head and says, with bright innocent eyes and a mean pout, “What changed?”  
There’s the answer he gives her, which is silent except for the sound of their lips meeting, and the true answer. The answer he gives suits a rule-breaker, suits the night they’re having, suits her so well she never returns to the question and in all likelihood forgets she ever asked it. Danny gets away with that because she was kidding. Maybe just because he’s getting away with a hell of a lot tonight.  
But the charm hanging over him just now does not keep the true answer from scuttling across his mind, black and spidery. Just the slightest flutter in the feeling of absolute, vindicated, self-perpetuating confidence this evening.  
Since when isn’t he scared of Dylan? Since the day and hour he met Allen Scott-Frank…


	3. Chapter 3

Don’t listen to Atlas.  
More often than not, that’s solid advice. It gets thrown around a lot, within the organization. Very few people ever get farther than, But Danny said, before someone else tosses out that catch-all counterstrike. Don’t listen to Atlas. Bless him, he’s a very intelligent gentleman, and there are an awful lot of subjects on which he can be trusted. The trouble is simply that he knows that. He knows it and follows it to a seemingly logical, nonetheless spurious conclusion.  
Put simply, he thinks he’s always right. And as with anybody suffering such an affliction, it’s best not to encourage them in the slightest. Therefore, don’t listen to Atlas. You’ll only make him worse. And please, especially remember to stop up your ears if he says anything remotely personal. It’s only because he takes things so personally himself. Makes him, oh, just a touch snippy, sometimes.  
Take what he said about Allen for instance. Allen isn’t scary. He can be, in fact he’s been told he has rather a talent for it, when he tries. But perish the thought that he ever intended to scare Atlas. Heavens, no…  
No, Allen would suggest that what the poor man is actually afraid of is failure. It takes no close observation or great leap of imagination to see that. This idea of Allen’s being scary, that only kicked in after it was pointed out to him that if the Eye had not intervened on the Horsemen’s behalf in Macau that it is unlikely they would have had any success with their little ad hoc heist, unlikely even that they all would have escaped the city alive. And alright, so it was Allen who pointed it out. And he may not have couched it in such polite and evasive terms. And yes, fine, there was a moment at the end where he might have laughed it off and said something else to make a joke of it and he chose not to do that.  
Look, all he wants is a competent, reliable staff. Is that so much to ask? Hasn’t he got enough to contend with? He wants to look down over all the strata of the organization, public and secret, and see no ugly problems rearing up. They get quite enough of that coming from outside, thank you very much. He can do without the added pressure of having to worry about those who are supposed to be the best of the best, supposed to be the face they show the world.   
It may or may not have been Allen’s idea for Atlas to stay in Macau, with all those constant reminders of his arrogance and near-catastrophic mistakes, for the duration of their current intermission. Not least because he’d have to learn the language before he could start trying to interfere…  
Across the room, the muted rush of a welding torch cuts out. It’s a pity; Allen actually finds that noise very soothing. It’s part of the reason he came into the workshop in the first place.   
The torch is set down on the long workbench with a clank that stops him even in the act of raising his teacup from the saucer to his lips. The welder straightens up from their intent hunch, one clunky glove coming up to snatch the tinted goggles off. It ceases to be just a shape, alien with insectoid eyes and becomes Sybil again. With the back of her forearm she drags the sweat from either side of her neck. “Do you know you’re telling me all this out loud?”  
“Well, I rather thought you were listening.”  
“Not a word.”   
He watches, not exactly speechless but something uncomfortably close to it, while she rearranges the bench, sets up a soldering iron to heat, studying the ornate metal racks already in front of her, and generally paying him as little attention as she claims she had so far.  
Why did he come down here again?   
Not a half-hour ago he was upstairs in the observatory. His observatory, as he likes to think of it. Forget that its official title is in fact the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, rather implying that it is Her Majesty who owns the place. Forget the parts of the building which are open to the more-trouble-than-they’re-worth public. Forget the tour guides, who certainly act like they own the place. This beautiful old building on the hill by the river is a global centre of operations and logistical co-ordination for the Eye. It has been, in some capacity or another, for hundreds of years. Operations are currently centralized, logistics co-ordinated, by Allen. It is his observatory.  
Upstairs there are rooms upon rooms closed to the public, exquisitely decorated, flooded with natural light from above, beautifully maintained and supplied.  
And where is he? Underground. Down in the warren of workshops and rehearsal spaces and storage which has been gradually expanding ever since the place was built, honeycombing the hillside like roots digging in to ensure their base is anchored safely here forever.   
That is the terribly romantic way of putting it. Essentially, Allen has chosen to put himself in a dingy subbasement with an irritable ingenieuse who, now that he thinks about it, turned up her music almost as soon as he began to speak.   
Sybil is just picking the soldering iron when indignation gets the better of him. “You know, I always thought you were easy to talk to.”  
Another thunk, another tool slammed down, another breath she heaves in and out before she can even address him through gritted teeth. “I thought you said you wanted this trap cage ready for shipping tomorrow morning?”  
“Ah. Well, yes, do need that, quite ri-“  
“In that case I now have to fix an invisible hinge no bigger than the pedicured nail on your little toe into place with absolute accuracy so that nobody loses any fingers and we don’t kill any canaries. Therefore, Allen, with all due respect and the best will in the world, kindly piss off out of my workshop.”  
Allen is halfway to the door, sheepish and shuffling, before he realizes he doesn’t have to take that. As a matter of fact, it is actually dangerous for him to take that. That’s the thin end of the edge, the top of a slippery slope, that’s an invitation to a culture of disrespect and insubordination, to chaos, to the beginning of the end for the tightly-run ship that is his observatory. But, as perhaps the string of clichés implies, he’s having an awfully hard time doing anything about it. Can’t move beyond those basic, readily available thoughts into anything more complex. Most unforgivable of all, he can’t find a comeback.   
He pauses before he shuts the door on her and points around the sprawl of equipment and lockers and scrap metal. “I gave you this workshop.”  
“And I thank my lucky stars each day but –“  
“You try getting an acetylene torch into this building without me.”  
“ – Bye now.”  
He hesitates for a moment in the hallway. It’s not just the closed door in front of him, not just being so resolutely shut out by someone he came to for company. He’s considering venturing further into the maze. There are other occupied rooms, other people working. And he really ought to check up on certain tasks, see that certain targets are met, promises fulfilled. There is an awful lot of speculative, blue-sky work going on down here but some of it is more structured. Some of it has deadlines. There’s a Turkish tailor two hallways east and a long walk south Allen actually does need to look in on.   
Or he could take his tea back upstairs and go back to the usual grind of bookings and phone calls and false identification and…  
It’s been a while, you know. It’s been a while since there was an event, a real show, a grand old performance on a world stage. And as much as he knows that’s supposed to be a good thing, that long periods of quiet are necessary for the safe continuation of their work, it would just be nice if…  
…if something went wrong.  
No! No, he recoils just from the thought, no, that was not what he meant, he doesn’t know where that idea came from, he likes his gentle, regimented life, he likes the order at his observatory, likes things going well, doesn’t want anything to go wrong, don’t be ridiculous, who would want that? No. Absolutely not. An unwanted, useless, incorrect thought, a horrible little gremlin that crawled out of some dark corner of his mind and was immediately struck back with a mallet.   
But now that the subject has come up…  
No. No, no, and he keeps chiding himself, no, as he turns away from the darkening mouths of the underground tunnels, back towards the mosaic floor at the foot of the stairwell, the safe stairwell, glowing white marble, light and bright and ordered and safe. He’ll go back upstairs, he’ll make another cup of tea, close the door of his office and work like a devil. And he’ll like it. He will enjoy it. And nothing, nothing, will go wrong. Any twist of fate which may be raising its heavy head from its long sleep, might have heard his unmeant thought and even now be sniffing him out, can still be defeated. With determined resistance, with finding pleasure in monotony, it can be defeated. It’s not too late.  
Though you may like to note, a certain conversation in Paris was more than twelve hours ago now. Events in Hong Kong, not much less than that. Fate has been twisted already. Allen’s intrusive, unhelpful thought might not have been a curse so much as a premonition.  
At any rate, it does not get a chance to recur. Soon enough he forgets he ever had it. He’s halfway up the second flight of stairs when the upper door opens with such force that he flinches. The teacup rattles on its saucer. He watches it careful for a moment, watches the single drop bead up on the rim and tremble with indecision. It’s not until it runs down the inside, back into the tea, and not down the outside of the delicately painted china, that he settles again, and looks up to see who it is has come in such a dreadful hurry.  
Not that he really needs to look.  
“Morning, Jack.”  
“Is Lula here? I already tried the zoo and the usual places but she won’t answer her phone.”  
It seemed like a good idea, keeping Jack and Lula in London. The arguments were much simpler than those for sending Atlas to China. They have the most to learn and the observatory has the most to teach. It’s only in the months since that Allen’s thought of a few reasons they might have been placed elsewhere, Lula’s occasional off-stage vanishing acts chief amongst them.   
Still, it was a distraction he was after. He stops on the landing and makes a show of thinking it over. “Now that you mention it, something tearful and glittery did storm past my desk early today.”  
“Yeah, man, that’s her…”  
In fairness to him, the anxiety on Jack’s face reads as genuine. The timing, too, speaks to a more serious incident. Very hard to argue about anything early in the morning. You have to feel something really very deeply to go at it over breakfast. Add in the fact that he mentioned the zoo first when the zoo is usually a last resort, and that he seems to have thought it unlikely that she’d come here to attempt any sort of work, this is the real thing.   
Something went wr – but Allen catches himself mid-thought and turns to lead off back downstairs.  
“So what have you done?”  
“I have no clue but it was really bad this time.”  
“Well, that’s the right attitude to go in with.”  
The steps on the stairs behind him stop momentarily. Allen looks back and sees one hand balling up into an accustomed fist. It opens again, but only into the shape of a strangling claw. “I don’t need this,” and Jack’s anger comes from fear, from powerlessness, from heartfelt uncertainty. “Goddamn English sense of humour, my ass, I do not need-“  
“Oh. Oh, no, not sarcasm. No, really, I think it’s very sensible. One way or another you’ll find it out it was all your fault so you might as well just accept it before you begin. But whatever you do, don’t agree with her. She’ll think you’re humouring her. Stick to asking open-ended questions, let her do the talking. The truth will be in there somewhere and she’ll run out of steam.” Thinking less generally, more specifically who he’s talking about, “Eventually, she’ll run out of steam. Probably.”   
The clawing hand relaxes. The footsteps begin again, hurrying to catch up. A wary sort of gratitude replaces the burning glare. If Allen were the sort, like an absent friend of theirs, to take everything very personally, it might almost be insulting. As much as it would be lovely if they paid a little more attention when he’s trying to teach the art of a successful heist – beginning with good planning – he’s got a lot more to offer than that.  
Just a little way into the maze Allen stops and points at a dark, heavy door. It should be noted, he doesn’t actually say anything about it. But Jack is distressed; he follows along with the simplest cue and goes to look inside.  
The moment the handle so much as turns, tools go crashing, curses are thrown about, “Wilder, how many times?, you can’t just come wandering in here when you please!”  
In the hallway, Allen hangs his head. Horrible of him. Horrid thing to do, really very cruel. Very petty, to avenge himself thus by interrupting Sybil. Terrible thing to make Jack suffer, poor man’s got enough on already. It is utterly awful, quite the nastiest thing he’s done in days and Allen must not laugh. Or, anyway, he mustn’t be caught laughing.  
“H- Have you seen Lula around?”  
“What does this look like, bloody Lost Girlfriend department? I have seen nothing this day but cage pieces and aggravation, now take yourself out of here!” Jack retreats fast, as if he’d been waiting on her order. The door closes on, “Been like bloody Piccadilly in here!”, the echoes chasing him back so quick he stumbles.   
By the time Jack has straightened again, Allen has straightened his face. “What was the point of that?!”  
“Preparation,” he lies. “Lula won’t come near that level of vicious, unprovoked bellowing. You’re ready for anything now.” But as he leads on again, and really to the right room this time, his conscience bears down on him. “And honestly, I’m just in a terrible bloody mood. Thought it might help.”  
“…And did it?”  
“More than I could ever have hoped.”


	4. Chapter 4

Lula got into a straitjacket. Quite how is anybody’s guess but she did, and it is tied and latched and buckled tight. She’s on the single chair in the centre of a room rimmed with racks full of similar outfits she might have chosen.   
She is not struggling. Her last struggling phase ended five minutes ago. Now she’s in a contemplating phase. There must be some trick to this get-up, she just has to find it. She feels one of the back buckles through the canvas of the sleeves, but the canvas is thick, offers no sensitivity and no grip through to the other side. This is her third contemplating phase. The first two blended immediately into frantic struggling phases. If she’s completely honest, contemplating phases only happen when fear or exertion gets the better of her.   
She’s having one relatively placid moment before the struggling starts up again. Back in the chair and she’s got her breath back from the last round, managed to get her hair out of her face. Really, the timing of the knock on the door couldn’t be better. She looks sane. Except, obviously, for the straitjacket, but as a person, inside the jacket, she has definitely looked crazier. She’s looked crazier today.   
In her sweetest, sanest voice and barely a trace of her trapped terror, “Who is it?”  
“Lula, it’s me.”  
Jack. Now, this is a problem, because under other circumstances she would have told Jack to get lost, would have told him the door was locked and stood against it. Actually, that wouldn’t work. Tell him it’s locked and that only buys you maybe a minute, just long enough for him to stick a pick inside and figure out you’re lying. But the point would have been made. If he was being a gentleman and good and upright, he wouldn’t even have tried the lock. There is also the fact that she is slowly beginning to accept, she might need some help getting out of this jacket.  
She’s hesitated too long. “Lula, come on. Tell me I can come in.”  
The strap that runs between her legs and up to her lower back is really starting to ride up since her last struggling phase. “Do whatever you want, doesn’t matter to me.”  
“Don’t be like th-“ but by then he’s opened the door and has to bite his tongue.   
A serious warning, seriously unamused, “Don’t do it.”  
“No, no, I wasn’t… I wasn’t going to.”  
“I have thought of every joke running through your head already, so don’t.”  
“I won’t.” But he doesn’t say anything more. He doesn’t move. He can’t even look directly at her anymore and eventually, with his eyes shut and his head turned to one side, “Just a little one, one little joke, just to get-“  
“- get past it, get it out of your system. Fine. One joke.”  
“That’s a good look for you.”   
Lula nods. It’s not the joke she would have gone for, in his shoes, but it’s solid and she respects that. Now she can go right back to not speaking to him. At least, not until she’s decided she definitely needs his help.  
She can see how the whole thing will play out. She knows exactly what he’ll say and at what point he’ll see things her way. She knows exactly how long after that she’ll decide he’s suffered enough and forgive him. The first part is always really defensive. So are you going to tell me what I did, something along those lines, something to make her the problem. It never works but he always tries. It’s almost cute, in a way, how he persists in trying to win.  
And yet, next time Jack speaks, leaning easily back against the doorframe, he’s not defensive at all. In fact, he admits. He apologizes. Not for the right offence, but still. “You remember that time you told me, and you were really sure and you swore on anything you could reach that seemed to be even remotely important, that you saw a tiger way out in that corridor by the Tube line? And I still didn’t believe you? Well, I’m sorry. I believe you now.”  
“You saw the tiger too?”  
Considering it was a month ago and she hadn’t seen it since, and you’d think a tiger would be a difficult thing to keep secret, she’d been starting to think he was right to doubt.   
“I stroked the tiger. It was being walked or… or whatever you do with a tiger… by a five-foot Ghanaian guy. He’s called Effiom, you should meet him.”  
“The tiger or the guy?”  
“The guy. Didn’t get the tiger’s name.”   
Lula laughs. Then she catches herself and stops. Goes back to carefully feeling for a way out of the straitjacket sleeves. She wasn’t even laughing at Jack, wasn’t laughing because he’s funny, wasn’t laughing because he makes her laugh. She was laughing at the idea of the tiger being real. Come on, there’s a tiger living under the Royal Observatory. Maybe that’s why this is the one spot in subterranean London with no rats. Don’t they do that at Disneyland, let feral cats out at night to control the vermin? It’s a funny image, right? One of the tunnels reaches out right under the deer park out back of building, she wonders if the tiger can smell all that soft underbelly right above its head. That’s why she laughed.  
“He was the one who told me where to find you. The guy, not the tiger. He said you’d been in here a while.”  
“Yeah, well, this is my third jacket.”  
“Oh. Marathon session, huh? Don’t let me interrupt.”  
“You’re not interrupting. I’m still working.”  
“Only you haven’t moved since I came in here.”  
“Did you want something?”  
“Mostly? To know you were okay, and where you were? After the way you took off this morning, I just…” This is it, this is the defensive bit. This is the part where he tries to make it sound like she’s crazy. She’s made that really easy for him today, she’ll have to take the hit on that unless she can get out of this jacket pretty damn soon, but that’s not a death blow. There are plenty of ways to come back from that. “…I checked the zoo, the way you took off. And then when you didn’t answer your phone-“  
Ah. Well, she can appreciate that would have worried him. Lula would worry if Jack didn’t answer his. Luckily she has a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. She tries to point, strains her shoulder and remembers just to nod him in the right direction. Her own, more stylish jacket hangs on the end of the rail to his right. If you’re watching closely – and you better believe Lula is – you see the smallest ripple of frustration go over him. But he bites it back. Not normal. This is not the battle she was expecting. None of this is going to the usual plan. Lula doesn’t know if she likes it or not.   
Jack reaches into her pocket and removes her cell. “That would explain it. Wait… How long did you say you’ve been here? I started calling you ages ago.”  
Caught. There are excuses to give but they all suck so she accepts defeat. It’s liberating, actually, going suddenly limp after so long fighting for escape. “Okay, if I said ‘gusset strap’ would you know what I was talking about?”  
“Yes.”  
“Please, dear God, please come over here and loosen that for me, please, now, it’s cutting me in half.”  
Jack doesn’t make her wait. No torture, no gloating, he just comes and does it. The moment the buckle releases Lula wriggles it out from under her, breathing properly for what feels like the first in a long time. It’s only when she’s done cursing the rough, narrow little bitch of a thing that she realizes Jack is still behind her. “Lula, how did you get into this?”  
“I don’t remember, it’s been so long.”  
“Yeah, not surprised. You know it isn’t rigged, right? There’s no holds or releases or… Lula, it’s just a completely straight straitjacket.”  
She turns her head as far as she can. Then, once she has assured herself he isn’t laughing at her, she consents to be helped out of her bind. During her last struggle she got one of her elbows twisted and has been starting to lose the sensation in her fingertips so it’s probably for the best. The loss is crushing though; she now has absolutely nothing to offer in an argument. There is nothing she can say where he can’t eventually counter that he should have left her in that jacket. Should have done what she asked and went away.   
But if you think that’s going to stop her telling him all of it you don’t know her at all. There’s a time limit on her now. She has to get it all off her chest before the jacket comes off. So with Jack behind her, where she can’t see him react, speaking fast enough that he could never interrupt, Lula counts down buckles and transgressions.  
“Why isn’t this killing you? Doesn’t this all feel like wasted time to you? Don’t get me wrong, I love it here, I love that we have all this on our doorstep, if it would stop raining I would love London more than certain members of my own family but why aren’t we doing anything? Is this what you signed up for, sitting around waiting to be safe? Why doesn’t this bother you? Actually, don’t even answer that because I know what you’re going to say. Same thing Allen keeps saying, same thing Dylan says every time he bothers to get in touch, that it can’t be constant, that’s how we get caught, blah-blah-blah but we have to do something, right? What even are we if we don’t do something? And when I asked you this morning what we were doing today, it was just so brutally obvious that none of this was even close to crossing your mind and I just, I had to get out, so I did.”  
Actually, that didn’t take as long as she thought. Or maybe he’s taking his time; undoing the tied string behind her neck, he’s slow and delicate, unpicking the knot rather than just tugging, because there are hairs trapped in it.   
“You’re not saying anything.”  
The back wings of the canvas come loose and fall forward. Jack helps it falls, hands stopping at her shoulders to roll them back into a normal position. “Thank you for telling me what’s up. I understand now. I’ll try harder to understand in future.”  
“No.” She almost twists an ankle to match her aching arm, she tries to get away from him so fast. Backing away, one hand held out to keep him at bay, “Who are you? You’re not Jack. You are way too calm.”  
The look on his face is all too familiar; caught. He tried something and she called it. “It took, like, forty minutes to find you. I’ve had advice from three people and a tiger on how not to turn this into yelling and consequences.”  
“Do… Do tigers give good relationship advice?”  
“Depends. Are you still mad at me?”  
“Depends. Do you know the way out of here? I was completely spaced out this morning, I just wandered here.” He’s nearly sure. Which is more than she is and more than she was expecting so Lula grabs her jacket and gets the door. “You go first. Then I get a head start if we come across any hungry wildlife.”  
“I think it’s okay, he seemed like a really chilled tiger.”  
But she acts as if she’s taking no chances. Really it’s just an excuse to be a step behind him, so he can’t see her flipping off the straitjacket lying in a heap on the floor. When she turns back he’s already speaking. Softly, thinking she’s at his shoulder. Softly like he might be saying comforting things, for her ears only. Lula creeps up close on her toes before she lets a heel give her away. She catches up at, “ – get easier. It doesn’t feel like it now but it does. And you have to let it go. Otherwise bad stuff happens, that’s how China happened, remember? Because Danny couldn’t let it go. Anything, something’s going to happen soon.”  
“Wait, really?”  
“It has to. Allen’s losing it. He got me yelled at by Sybil before. I think he’s starting drama just to have something to do. It would be funny except you think of the resources that guy has. He could probably start a war if he got really bored.”  
“Hang on, go back. Sybil yelled at you?” At the intersection of two corridors, he glances back with a nod. It’s partly an answer and partly to distract her from the fact that he’s obviously got no clue which way to turn. “And you survived?”  
“Had to. Had to come rescue you, didn’t I?”  
“You are so smooth today. I’m going to find that tiger. The zen tiger of cool, I’m going to stroke it too.”


	6. Chapter 6

Dylan is unaware of the existence of a zen tiger of cool. Even if he were told about it, he wouldn’t necessarily believe right away. And it is highly unlikely that he would ever really accept that it possesses any sort of mystic power to improve the social faculties of those who might be described kindly as being prone to the odd misstep.  
But honestly, today, if the animal were here in front of him, he’d give it a whirl. He’d try just about anything today. If it made the right promises and nobody was looking to see him do it, yes, in a heartbeat, without a second’s hesitation.   
Because, putting it bluntly, he’s not feeling exactly zen today.  
It’s his own fault. If he’d just stopped for a second last night, just examined what he was really doing when he told Alma to forget the rules and open up, he’d have seen all this coming. All of these consequences – the nerves, the slow-burning fear, the build-up of inconsequential things which have nothing to do with him except that he’s in the mood to be aggravated by every little thing – this was all predictable. Should have seen it coming. Whether that makes it worse or better, Dylan doesn’t know. It’s academic anyway. If this isn’t as rough as it gets, it will suffice until the real trouble arrives.  
She trapped him, you know. Alma, she trapped him. He’s had all day to think this over, to pick it apart word by word and this is the conclusion he has reached; she trapped him.   
Allow him to explain.   
She played him masterfully. Pretending she needed those few extra convincings, needed him to insist. That made it his idea. Which it was, but she nailed that down, she made sure there’d be no wriggling out of that. Any repercussions are now irrevocably his. Any responsibilities, his. Which is a masterstroke, right? A plea bargain before he ever knew there was a trial going on – she divested herself of any and all culpability.  
And she was not finished yet, oh no.   
Having cleared herself a snag-free path, running long and smooth into a future entirely free of liability or blame, Alma unburdened herself. And it was a horrible story. Obviously Dylan can’t share details. That’s the whole point; even he shouldn’t know. The perfect secrecy of their professional lives was allowed to bleed over, albeit in complete privacy. But believe him when he tells you, there’s a reason he’s so wound up today. It’s not something he ever considered, but hers is a world of brutal and very immediate dangers. Alma’s ugly tale ran over with violence and ambiguity and criminality without honour or remorse. Ran into the early hours, too, too complex to compress, a tangle of threads to outmatch any mob case he ever worked on. Global networks, faceless puppetmasters, blackmail on a scale the mind can’t comprehend all at once…  
This is getting awful close to being detailed. Which you know he can’t do. You understand, don’t you, that it’s a security consideration? For your own protection as much as theirs, you need to keep your nose out of this one. The only way you’d ever find out what Alma’s been working on – and getting nowhere with – for months now is if these horrors were to collide somehow with their day-to-day life.   
We don’t want that.  
Even without the details, though, maybe you can imagine how it felt. Sitting there listening to her, feeling hours go by and her not even noticing the time because the pressure had been that huge. Suddenly released, there was no stopping it until she was done, until there was no more left to say. Shock and surprise faded after the first hour, fear not long after. After that it was mostly anger. Low and simmering, and not just on Alma’s behalf. There’s an old anger in all good hearts; anger at injustice, anger at inhumanity, anger at how some people just seem to keep getting away with it.   
Dylan’s never had a lot of patience with people who just seem to keep getting away with it.   
“Stop,” she said. It was actually where the story ended. Whether it was meant to end there or Alma could just see what was going on behind his eyes and knew it had to end, who can say? “No, stop. I know what you’re thinking. Stop.”  
“Stop what? I didn’t say anything.”  
“You don’t have to say anything, I know you better than that and I’m telling you to stop. Stop now, right there.”   
Dylan might have gone on playing dumb but those eyes fixed him. He never can look right at her when she’s mad. “Come on, you know I don’t pick targets. That all comes down from on high. But, if, you know, this were to somehow accidentally fall onto the radar, then-“  
“No!” That was a sudden snap that forgot the hour and the neighbours. She caught herself and, along with her voice, lowered her head onto his shoulder. Almost groaning, “You cannot help with this. This is why we don’t talk about it. We made up other reasons to hide it, but this is why. Promise me.” She looked up again, and this time made it impossible to avoid her gaze. “Promise me you’ll forget. Promise me you won’t act on a single word I’ve said tonight.”  
There! That was it, did you catch it? That was the second part of the masterplan. That was how she tied him up in the knots which still today hold fast. He couldn’t refuse the promise – for one she wouldn’t let him walk away until he agreed to it. But look at it again. Look at the wording. Look at the all-encompassing language. Not a single word. Won’t act. Act. Anything is an act. Bar maybe breathing and heartbeats and things that require no agency, what doesn’t come under the banner of an act?  
She bound him. More effectively than any straitjacket on the planet, rigged or unrigged. Like an ancient curse, she bound him.  
Trapped. At two in the morning and with all her distress, she trapped him. The woman is a miracle. Or, more accurately, the opposite of that. Whatever you call a miracle when it doesn’t come from heaven but the other place.  
This was a very long day, because of that promise. Very long indeed, painful. Difficult to concentrate, to get anything done, with that hanging over him.  
That is, until Dylan spotted the loophole.  
Promise me you won’t act on a single word I’ve said tonight.  
Okay, fine.   
But for the first half-hour of the whole ordeal she wasn’t talking at all. She was curled up pretending to read a magazine and eating badly. She didn’t make him promise not to act on that. He can fix that part. And in the process, fix the part of himself that started screaming pretty much the second the promise was made because what was he thinking? Dylan rendered himself helpless. Who chooses that? Who chooses to give up their right to help and protect someone they love by any and all means at their disposal? That’s one of those rights you’d die fighting to keep.  
He’s mad at himself. He wasted a good hour this morning when he should have been working – no details on that either, sorry – trying to count back to the last time he felt really, truly helpless. Without giving too much away he counted a long way back before he gave up.  
It would be worth noting, for the sake of context, Dylan is something of a special case. He’s used to having more control over a situation than most. Essentially, you should think of him now as normal. He has been reduced to the state of any partner of any professional doing an important and difficult job, particularly in an area so dangerous as international law enforcement. But, bless his heart, it’s been a while since Dylan’s been anything close to normal. He doesn’t know how common it is, what he’s going through. He’s uncomfortable, feeling unfairly picked on. Be kind to him, he’s trying.  
In fairness to him, though he finds himself taking the self-same action as millions before him, it takes a little more effort for them. Considering one of them is a wanted felon and the other could lose everything she ever built and loved if they’re seen together, ‘spontaneous’ is never really an option.  
On the upside, the nightmare logistics of arranging dinner out have proven an excellent distraction.  
You need a friendly place with staff who are in on the trick. That wasn’t so bad, there are a few of those in the city. Nowhere fancy but she wouldn’t want that anyway. It has to be out of the way, minimize foot traffic, nowhere with too many windows, ideally a basement or an upstairs. The idea is to go unseen without the unromantic strain of hiding. You also need multiple speedy exits, just in case. And it would be crazy to arrive together so, because he still wanted to surprise her, that necessitated notes and subtle clues, little hints to get her here without giving the game away. Even after all of that, there’s a knot in his stomach, waiting the restaurant bar, because she might not come. This might be all too close to a promise broken. Or she missed it completely, walked through the door this evening and went directly to bed.   
The knot stays right up until he sees her. Reflected in the bar-back mirror, tired but smiling. Her hair is down. For the first time in a couple of weeks she’s wearing jewellery, a silver bracelet with bright glass beads. He brought it back from a certain trip to Venice that really made him appreciate what was good in his life, most of which is standing in front of him right now.  
She allows him, grudgingly, to greet her with a kiss before she tells him, “You know as well as I do this is madness.” When he tries to wave her off, “And you promised you’d forget.”  
“Forget what?” Alma rolls her eyes. “No, really, help me out. I have this big gap in last night. Last thing I remember is making our tea and then… And then it was dawn.”  
She calls him an idiot and he laughs because he knows what that means.  
The little corner table doesn’t seem out of the way, just cosy. Dylan sits with his back to the room, yes, but one of them had to. If you didn’t know better you wouldn’t look at them twice. You’d hardly look the first time, averting your eyes because they are caught up in each other. Even to look is to intrude, to break into an intensely personal moment. They talk about nothing and it feels like everything.   
For Alma it happens in the ringing of one of the glass beads against a wine glass, almost knocking it over. Dylan finds it in the stretch of her neck when she looks around for a waiter with a dessert menu. Both of them gets that one pristine second when they forget what they are and become just like anybody else.  
Dylan is almost beginning to feel proud of himself. The night’s not over so he’s still wary, but he may, in fact, have pulled this off. If you want to think about it in very cliché, self-aggrandizing terms, and he does, Dylan pulled a beautiful rabbit out of this very empty hat of a day. Dessert arrives and he thanks the waiter by name. Up until now it’s just about reminding himself that he knows these people, that he’s okay here. This time it’s just because he knows the guy’s name. Dylan never even sees him, just feels the presence at his shoulder. Starting to reach that level of ordinary, inattentive comfort. Starting, almost, to feel pretty good about himself; for somebody who wasn’t supposed to remember anything or act upon it…  
Alma’s hand is slipping off the table. It reaches back, just touching the strap of her purse hanging on the back of the chair.  
She never stops smiling, doesn’t let her posture change at all, but that doesn’t mean she stays the same. Something crystallizes, switches back on again just when they were doing so well. This is the same relaxed happiness but now she’s faking. Performing, for whoever she seems to think is watching. “You would never take me anywhere that didn’t have a back door, would you?”  
“Of course not. What’s the matter?”  
“You called that waiter Gerard, like before. And he didn’t say a word, didn’t react at all.” Dylan shrugs. He begins to look over his shoulder but under the table her foot presses down hard on his so he stops. Still through the stiff, doll-like smile, “That was not the same waiter.”


End file.
